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Wednesday, 11 December 2013

No doubt, after the Snowden revelations and the recent
confrontation between Germany and the US, several citizens will be asking
themselves whether their private communications are under surveillance, and to
what extent. This very event has triggered intensive debate in the media and in
the political arenas of several European countries not only about the extent
and purpose of the surveillance programs, but also about one of the
technologies that are being used to arrange such surveillance: that is Big Data.
Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that
demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced
insight and decision-making.[2]

It must be acknowledged that there are different ways of
using Big Data, and that the application of this set of technologies does not
necessarily need to be oriented towards the surveillance of individual
citizens. For instance, data can be anonymised, which allows research to be
conducted and data to be extracted and analyzed without preserving any link
between the data and the citizens to whom these data are related.

Is technology neutral?

However, this is not equal to saying that Big Data is a
neutral technology. Any technology, regardless of how many uses it may have, is
never neutral. Technologies, or rather sociotechnical practices, can never be
understood as stand alone pieces of human art crafts because they only work and
make sense in a network of socially constructed meanings, practices,
organizational protocols and tailor-made jargons. They come with their own
ethics, their own values. These values reflect the dominant political
priorities and ethical values of the societal stakeholders producing and using
such technologies. They may indeed change over time, but they will do so along
with the changes occurring in the society adopting, sustaining and implementing
such sociotechnical practices.

This is, in a few words, the basic assumption proposed by
what is known as a co-production approach in science and technology studies [3]:
science and social order are co-produced and they live in a mutually
constitutive relationship. Producing new scientific knowledge, as well as the
new technological tools stemming from such knowledge, produces new forms of
social order, and the opposite is also true: in order to produce new forms of
social order, new knowledge and technical tools are constantly fabricated.

Of cars and Big Data

An example, perhaps, may illustrate this better. If asked
about the cost of a specific car, we would normally answer by pointing at the
price of that car. But that is hardly the actual cost… or better that is the
cost only if seen from a specific point of view, which externalizes all the
real costs of a car and narrows the question down to the transaction between
the car dealer and the potential customer. However, cars, as a technology, only
make sense as part of a sophisticated network of sociotechnical practices that
needs to be constantly maintained to ensure that cars can fully operate across
a given space. Cars need roads, police, laws, speed cameras, hospital, doctors,
insurance companies, mechanics, gasoline pumps, etc. Without these
sociotechnical infrastructures and practices, a car is simply a meaningless,
useless box with five seats and four wheels. All these infrastructures have a
cost and we accept that most of these costs are to be paid collectively by the
citizens, often via the public system of tax collection. And why do we do so?
Because we believe that cars are a socially legitimate way to move around.

If that is true for cars, it is even more so for Big Data.
The latter, as a sociotechnical practice of security, only can be understood in
a society that understands security as a function of surveillance. This is why,
in so far as security is concerned, Big Data could never be anonymised as it
would not make sense to have millions of data proceeding from harmless
citizens’ communication without having name and surname (and much more) on it.
The question, thus, is not whether we are spied or not, but rather: how did we
come to pursue a concept of security, where many seem to believe that the
latter can only be increased through massive surveillance programs operated
through Big Data technologies?

A paradigm shift concept of security?

While in the 1990s, human security was associated with human
development, human rights and multilateralism, in the aftermath of the Twin
Towers attack it has evolved into a new, encompassing term that questions the
separation between internal and external security: religious fundamentalism,
ethnic conflicts and guerrilla-type wars are sources of threats that can well
come from inside the state borders [4]. As a result, internal and external
security agendas have eventually merged together [5]. Drug-trafficking, undocumented migration, and
economic crimes cease to be an issue of justice or social integration and,
overloaded with urgency and exceptionality, get subject to a new security
approach emphasizing threat anticipation.

In a regime of threat anticipation, risk assessment and risk
management become the cornerstone of a comprehensive approach that is geared to
constant detection and prevention of the threats and risks. In this new
approach, security is expanded well beyond the criminal domain in order to cope
with any sort of suspicious behavior, information or action that could
potentially constitute a threat. The resulting securitization of people’s
movements and actions cannot be confined to migrants: under the new concept of
security, controlling and integrating all sorts of information about ordinary
citizens is nothing but inexorable.

The constitutive role of security technologies

In this approach to security, surveillance-oriented security
technologies, and the analysis of Big Data is one of them, play a constitutive
role: they are part of a new social order. As it has become impossible to
conceive security without technology, we are permanently exposed to a
technological fix approach to the problem of security: the focus constantly
shifts from the search for a (complex) variety of causes and factors that has
produced the on-going transformation of security threats to (simple) series of
technological remedies that could be conceived, developed and implemented to
keep these challenges under control.

Inevitably, the successful deployment of new security
technologies under this new holistic concept of security comes at a cost: a
restriction of civil liberties and individual privacy. Security and liberty get
framed as two interchangeable goods that could be traded against each other:
any increase in security requires an equivalent contraction of civil liberties.
As the increase of security levels is intrinsically associated with an
ever-increasing implementation of surveillance technologies, it does not
consider the possibility of increasing security levels through either
non-surveillance-oriented technologies or through non-technological actions and
interventions.

Without freedom, we are no longer citizens

This is how we got to the point where millions of citizens
around the world are spied indiscriminately. However, once we have lost our
privacy, we can no longer act, meet, communicate, share or express ourselves
freely. Under surveillance, regardless of whether we have something to hide or
not, we cannot enjoy our basic civil and political rights. It is in this
context that we have to understand Big Data. They are key to the development
and implementation to a specific vision of what needs to be promoted as social
order. Needless to say, this specific view of a desirable social order is at
the same time promoting and fostering the development and implementation of Big
Data.

This is why developing such powerful technologies and then
hope that a few parliamentary bills will prevent their full implementation is
wishful thinking. Rather, we need to learn to conceive security in different
terms, as a shared responsibility and not only a function of repressive and
preventive surveillance. Social and economic factors such as social and
cultural integration, welfare supports, rule of law, fair redistribution of
resources and citizens’ participation are at least as important. We often hear
that without security, citizens cannot be free. Sure, this is true. However, without
freedom, no matter how safe, we are no longer citizens.

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The activities leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 284709 - project 'FuturICT', a Coordination and Support Action in the Information and Communication Technologies activity area